Beijing Project n.12 Arong (Rong Guangrong) 荣光荣

Arong (Rong Guangrong) is a self-taught Chinese artist, documentary and film maker. With the Italian sinologist Ambra Corinti he co-founded and co-directs Zajia Lab; he lives and works in Beijing.

One of the best received interventions at Bernard Controls, Arong’s project set out to create an improvised learning environment, an informal moment of art education within the normal spaces and daily routine of the factory. He collected art books and magazines covering different periods of ancient and modern art and went around asking everyone to choose a page with an artwork and its explanation. The page was torn out and stuck near the person’s workstation, locker, desk or assembly line; soon torn pages appeared all over the factory like a strange decorative motif.

Later, after more discussions with employees, he installed four small screens playing video art in a loop, changed every two or three weeks, and next to them four baskets of art and design magazines to look at during toilet breaks and short pauses. These targeted, minimal interventions, together with his sensibility and natural manner, earned him a special relationship with the workers and their space: he was the first artist whom the workers spontaneously asked to pass on their ideas, opinions and suggestions about the programme.

As a final contribution, with the painting and packaging departments, Arong made a sculpture in the shape of the character 山, “mountain” – both a quotation of and a question to Mao’s famous call to the Chinese people to “overthrow the three old mountains”. Made of the lightweight foam used to pack Bernard’s products and painted the same blue as the actuators, it stands in the workshop above the screen used for staff meetings, next to Ma Yongfeng’s wall writing Invest in Contradiction. The sculpture, which gave the project its title, is a sign of the ambiguity and complexity of all that China is going through in these years of development. Having seen how, at least inside Bernard Controls, the unresolved dilemma of labour, production and human development is faced with commitment and respect, Arong asks himself, and China: are there any mountains left?

Arong: profile and filmography · Zajia Lab